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Japan’s Cultivated Wagyu Race Heats Up - Organoid Farm vs. Osaka’s Bioprinted Beef

Japan's cultivated Wagyu  race visual media

Japan’s obsession with perfect Wagyu is moving from pasture to petri dish. Organoid Farm, the Tokyo biotech now scaling Wagyu muscle cells to 200-litre bioreactors, has started supplying cultivated Wagyu beef cells to labs and foodtech partners across Japan. Their claim? A protein profile that sizzles, smells, and even flexes like the real thing.


But down in Osaka, a rival consortium led by Shimadzu and Osaka University is pushing a 3D-bioprinted “marbled steak” looking frighteningly close to A5-grade Wagyu and they’re eyeing automation by 2027. It’s a classic Japanese standoff with one side chasing scale and supply-chain readiness, the other gunning for perfection in edible engineering. The prize? Global bragging rights for the world’s first true cultivated Wagyu steak.


The real question now though, is cultural and that is, can Japan reinvent its most sacred food without losing face or flavour? For a nation built on craftsmanship and culinary ritual, the rise of lab-grown luxury meat is both heresy and harmony, a future where taste meets tech, and where the most traditional of meals might soon be downloaded from a bioreactor.



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